Choices
by EvanescingSky
Summary: Cadash never questioned her place in the Carta, until she came to the Inquisition. Suddenly, she's not so sure she likes who she's become.


In the Herald's Rest—a grand name for a hole-ridden outbuilding with more moss varieties than drink options, and more spiders than customers—newly-named Inquisitor Cadash was drinking. Blackwall found her there while scouting around the Inquisition's new-old home. Questions pressed him about what exactly Skyhold had been built for, and by whom, but the place was so old any living memory of it was long turned to dust. Conjecture was the only recourse left to them, much as with Corypheus and the Breach—even Cadash's hand in the Conclave.

Her drinking did not seem to be the celebratory guzzling of one who had just won a great battle—or at least avoided an ignominious defeat—but something deeper and considerably more corrosive. After a moment's hesitation, Blackwall approached.

"Do you think I'm a good person?" Cadash turned on him at once, and he wished he had stepped back out the door. Whatever rapport they had been building since she had recruited him to the movement, it did _not_ equip him to answer a question like that.

"Well now that's a hell of a question," he said, drawing up a stool beside her and promptly discovering one leg was several inches shorter than the other two, courtesy of some very desperate rodents. After he stabilized himself, he looked again to Cadash, taking another pained swig of beer, or whatever booze she'd scrounged up.

"I'm asking," she said. "You've known me for what…four, five months now? What do you think? Am I good person? I want an honest answer too, Blackwall, don't bullshit me."

The sheer irony of her asking him to judge such a thing walloped him in the back of the head. Repeatedly.

"I don't really feel like I'm the right person to make that judgement," he said cautiously. Cadash's full lips twisted in a scowl.

"You're afraid to answer the question," she said. "Then I have my answer." She knocked back a considerable draught and slammed the opaque bottle down on the dusty bar.

"No, that's not it," Blackwall said, all hesitance and unease pushed out of his voice. "I mean exactly what I said. Who I am to say? I'm not the Maker, I'm not Andraste. By what right do I decide if you're good or not? I don't even think I'd say _I'm_ a good person." Cadash barked out a biting laugh.

"You! Not a good person! You're _Warden Blackwall_. A damn Grey Warden. You gave up everything to serve Ferelden, put your life on the line for snot-nosed strangers who'll never give a shit or even _know_ what you did. There's no _fame_, no _riches_, no _power_…just the same brutal task, day after day. And at the end of it all, if you're _lucky_, your name will be scribbled down in some dowdy old tome buried in a Warden fortress at the ass end of nowhere." Cadash gave a vigorous shake of her head, then scrapped her auburn locks—bright, like burnished leaves in the fall, like the arc of color between the sky and the sun when it set, like the flicker of a warm flame— back over to the un-shaved side of her head. "I don't get it. I don't get any of you."

Cadash's cavalier attitude towards her hand in the Carta had always rubbed Blackwall the wrong way, but hearing her extol the virtues of a man that he was not wrought down a shame on him that silenced any fighting words he might have had with her on the issue.

"You just stood against Corypheus. A…darkspawn magister, or blighted mage, or _whatever_ he is," Blackwall reminded her when he had regained his voice. "That was a death sentence. One you took on so the rest of Haven could escape. I saw you go into that burning building to get Harritt out. And fight off the Darkspawn that were after Threnn." Cadash was already waving a dismissive hand, leaning over the bar to look for more to drink. "You've been helping people since you first stabilized the Breach."

"Everyone else helped," she said. "That's not special."

"But you did volunteer to face Corypheus." She was so short that to see anything on the other side of the bar, she practically had to stand on her stool. If there had been anything to grab, Blackwall would've gotten it for her.

"Okay, so that's one thing," she said. "Can one thing outweigh hundreds of others?" Growling when she uncovered nothing of worth, she dropped back down onto her seat and turned limpid gray eyes on Blackwall, pinning him to his seat. "You know I was with the Carta. But that's an abstract. You know I broke the law, but you don't know about the warehouses I burned down, the officials I bribed, the people whose throats I slit for threatening us. The fingers I broke for betraying us, the hands I forced to get what we needed. It's just the cost of doing business with the Carta. I did what I had to. You don't _play _at being Carta—you either learn fast and get good, or you die.

"I always saw myself as lenient—and I was, compared to others. You don't want to be too much of a threat. Become too much of a threat and they'll decide they'd be better off with someone else in power. You want to be a threat, but not as much as others—so they feel safe with you. You provide stability, safety, normalcy. It's amazing what people will put up with to maintain a sense of normalcy." Another hand carding through her hair, nails raking against her scalp. There was a slight flush in her face from the drink—already, Blackwall knew she hadn't had as much as she wanted, or she would've been far redder. "But then…everyone here is just so…_moral._ They're all out here trying to do the 'right' thing even when they get shit on for it. You, joining the Wardens. The Seeker, who was practically bloody _royalty_ and gave it up to be a glorified Templar, and for _what? _Because it felt _just_, because it was _righteous_? Varric, who has _no_ responsibility for what's going on, gave up looking for his best friend to stick with us and see this out.

"Dorian, if he had just sat pretty and played the game his parents wanted him to, could've had _everything._ He could have been the damn _Archon of Tevinter_ if he had just smiled right and shut his mouth. But he gave that up because—what? To run down here and try to fix someone else's mistake? To be _truthful_?

"Solas, who has _every goddamn reason in the world_ to stay a hundred leagues away from Seekers and chantries, _volunteered_ himself to help figure this thing out. If he had done the _smart_ thing and stayed the hell away, I'd be dead. Probably we all would be, because we never would have figured out anything about the Breach or the rifts." Another, gentler shake of her head. "I just don't get it. People are self-serving. They want to survive. That's how they are. Anything else is just _stupid_. So why is everyone here so goddamn terminally _good_?"

"Just because they look good to you doesn't mean they aren't struggling too," Blackwall told her quietly. "Every one of those decisions you just named probably came after a lot of thought and doubt. Everyone is just trying to do their best."

"We joined the Carta because we had no choice," Cadash said. "After they exiled us from Orzammar, what could we do? We did something we already knew about—mining and selling lyrium. That's what I always thought. I did what I had to for the family. But that's not right, is it? All of you had a choice. And it would have been easier to keep doing what you had been doing." There was a tremor in Cadash's breath as she drew it in, and Blackwall saw her hands rubbing at her thighs. Her eyes fixed on the far wall, then moved back to his, a vulnerability in them that he had never seen from her before. Coming from a woman who was so self-assured, who had made a pass at him within the first ten minutes of their meeting (slaying bandits excluded), it was more than a little jarring. Blackwall had expected her to be celebrating their survival, her own in particular, given its improbability. He thought back to how she had shaken her head when Leliana tried to tell her she was the prime candidate for Inquisitor, tried to side-step out of it. "I always thought I did what I had to. But now I'm starting to think every one of those things I did…the theft, the larceny, the bribery, the murder…they were all choices. And I'm not sure I like the choices I made."


End file.
